Entrepreneurship: A journey in self discovery | Ameera Shah | TEDxJanpath

so being an entrepreneur male or female I think in any part of the world is always a challenge right you have an idea you believe in it so much and even though others might not see it you put it out there every day and try to get people to back you you push and you push and you risk everything Yuri self-respect you risk your reputation you risk money you risk your time and most importantly you risk your heart and soul because every day you're putting yourself out there most people only see the final end of that success people see the name the money the the fame that people get out of becoming a multi billionaire but people don't often see in what see what happens behind the scenes because for that everyone success there are usually thousands of failure failure entrepreneurial journeys but every journey has been a very emotional one and probably a very painful journey at best for a woman and for a woman entrepreneur in a patriarchal society like India this journey is actually multifold it's a completely different ballgame and the question is really you know why is that because women usually face multiple challenges and the question is let us understand as to what the reason for that is and I'm going to share with you five short stories about of my own personal experiences as to the kind of challenges that I faced so first question I remember when I was maybe about ten years old and I was in school and I was playing and you know and in the gym with a few guys from my class and there were two guys in me and you know we got roughed up we were having a great time we fell a few times got a few scars came back to the headmistress and she was patching us up and she patches up the two boys and then you know with a lot of care and tenderness and then says okay now you guys are good to go you go play and then she looks at me and she patches me up and she says okay beta enough playing now why don't you go read a book in the library and I don't want you to get hurt anymore second story fast-forward a few years I was 21 I had just come back from the US after my education and I decided to start well my business and everywhere I went I was very proud of what I was doing I was trying to revolutionize pathology I was trying to build a chain of Bath labs I didn't exist in India which was standardized branded stood for global quality global practices and every time I would meet my male friends or I would meet uncles and aunts and I would try to tell them about what I was doing very proudly they say ha that's ok all that's fine but tell us something you know you're so pretty why do you want to work why don't you find yourself a nice guy who's going to come and take care of you fast forward a few years later I remember I had worked really hard and I'd worked on one acquisition and when I say acquisition this was an existing pathology laboratory a partner who was 60 years old this gentleman he was a doctor he had built his own path lab over 40 years and his daughter was my age and I had talked to him and said look it makes more sense for you to partner with me and we can build something much larger by this time we had about 10 15 centers we had a couple of hundred employees we were you know enthused he's in India and he had agreed it had taken a lot out of me for him to sit across the table even though I was a woman even though I was 40 years his junior and sit across and have a conversation and say okay I'll partner with you but the end of it he looked at me and he said you know me all this is fine but you know you're about 25 now and very soon I'm assuming I want to get married it's high time and when you get married maybe your husband's not going to like this business you're doing and maybe he wants you to work with him so if I partner with you what's going to happen like what's going to happen to this business is it going to shut down Story number four few years later business was growing was doing very well four five years later I was looking for funding I said okay now we're in a couple of countries we've got you know a thousand employees we need funding to grow even more and I was talking to the premier private equity guys in India and global funds and they believed in me they believed in my story they thought you guys are doing great India great growth potential lots that can be done at the end of it they come to me and say fantastic you know we want to invest but tell me something in a couple of years when you have babies how are you going to run this business I'm assuming you're going to quit and then watch and a story this was actually quite recent so you know I've done a few partnerships and in few international locations and one of my partners and one mentioned the location is a seventy year old man who I was sitting and having dinner with and you know these are leaders of large conglomerates in different countries and sitting and having dinner with her about ten o'clock at night and we're planning as to you know how we're going to grow this business and he tells me at the end at dinner he very very kindly offered to give me all kinds of assistance at 3 o'clock in the morning in my bedroom and the other partner who I was stuck with in a joint venture and was having a tug-of-war with and I was finally on the better end of the negotiations big stick and I was in a better situation got so annoyed at being outsmarted by a woman that finally took everything in his power to say I'm going to block you in this JV the question we've got to ask is is there a pattern and other things which is a common thread between all these different stories and why does this really happen so women entrepreneurs are in India specifically are faced with two challenges one is a conditioned lack of self belief literally you're trained from a very early or early age to think that you're not really capable to do much in life and you're you know the best-case situation for you is to find a great husband you know get married have children and you know you're done for and if that happens for you you're lucky and the second is an ecosystem that actually promotes the lack of self belief and this is unfortunately in unintentional but it's a very systematic so I figured out there were three things happening so from the time you're a young girl and you're growing up love equals to protection in the family oh I love you so much I want to take care of you this is what your father will tell you at pretty every stage of your life everybody will tell you but you know we want you to be fine your brother will come to take care of you we want you to be protected we don't want you to get hurt we don't want you to take any risk you know tomorrow how can you go alone anyway what if something happens to you so this constant protection this constant no availing of risk constant no uncertainty puts women in a position where you are actually never taking decisions you're actually learning how to deal with risk and uncertainty and you are always in a place in life where somebody's taking care of you the second question and the famous one which always comes is how will you manage in this question is how can you travel on your own or what will happen if tomorrow there are men who are trying to make a pass at you when you're at work or how will you you know deal with employees or how will you sign an agreement and the sub tone of all this how will you manage is you can't manage its again and again told to you that you know what you're not it's not only possible for you so don't even try there's no point and the third what you realize over time is in India women are always the object of beauty unfortunately not an object of intelligence we're always a woman who's pretty or a woman who's attractive almost feels even if she is not from a very great family in terms of wealth or in terms of income she knows she's going to be taken care of cuz not the likelihood is she's going to find a husband who wants to be with her because she's pretty and therefore she set for life right but if you're intelligent that's not necessarily guaranteed for you so when you take these different patterns in India and you question how do you really then deal with the situation and while the ecosystem is obviously going to take much longer to change and it's not going to be very quickly the only thing that we really can change in life is ourselves and I think that's where the process of self-discovery comes in and I think if for an Indian woman the process of self-discovery to find out who she really is what she's really capable of and who's what's the best that she can really be is the most important because you are so conditioned to say you can't but you actually need to put yourself out of your comfort zone put yourself in new experiences at the risk of failure keep trying try and find facets of yourself that don't otherwise you don't even know existed so you can recondition yourself from these new experiences and try to be somebody different from what you were meant to be from the time we're born this confidence has been systematically unintentionally but systematically destroyed for me the journey of boosting self-confidence has really been one that's taken years right and I think it's a process for everybody so finally the success actually before the confidence and for me a lot of it came from the from my own entrepreneurial journey it was the chance of saying I have to actually go out there I have to win confidence I have to have small successes I have to get people to back me I have to make sure that there are people believing in me and every day I've got to confront my darkest fears my most innermost vulnerabilities and figure out as to who I really am and what are the things that I'm most scared of and then actually go and do exactly those things because that's the only way to actually confront the risk to confront the fear and then be able to overcome it I think all of us have these thoughts right can I will I be able to am i aiming too high and high you know am I going to you know fall flat on my face and the most scary one am I going to be a failure and when those questions come up really we constantly think how do we get over this how you deal with these and how you deal with these reactions and situations in life I think will tell you finally naked ly who you really are and like I said what you can be and finally what we have the potential to gain out of all of this is really the one thing which is the biggest asset which is confidence which I think unfortunately in India where we are playing on a gender inequality game and not even an equal opportunity game this is the only real asset that I think Indian women can actually hold on to because it's not jewelry like we've been trained to believe that's going to be our partner for the rest of our lives but it's going to be this one asset that we can actually hold on to for me my journey has been a really incredible one I started at a very young age of 20 I'm 36 now it's been about 15 years of building my business and gone from having one Center to about 800 centers across seven countries and more than anything I feel like I've I've made a difference I've made a change I've helped provide better quality health care made it more affordable made it more accessible but at the end of the day if I see my entire journey and I put aside whatever success and whatever magazines and all of that and I think about what's been the biggest benefit for me and that's been the confidence that I'm talking about and the confidence to stand here today in front of you and the confidence that I genuinely hope we can impart and we can help build for all the daughters and our granddaughters and great-granddaughters in India because truly I think each each one of the women here has so much potential to be so much more but unfortunately just lack the platform to and that I hope will be the next purpose of my life to her you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 77,205

Rating: 4.9113402 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, India, Business, Entrepreneurship, Women, Women in business

Id: mYxdg9ywwMU

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2015